"Guests" installation at Journeys with No Return exhibition, Kurt-Kurt Gallery, Berlin, June 2010

photographs by Marcus Kern.

Journeys with No Return
Kurt-Kurt Gallery, BERLIN
11 – 20 JUNE 2010
Exhibition Preview: Fri 11 June, 2010, 7pm
Talk 2-3pm Sat 12th June: Curators Alice Sharp and Peter Cross, with the exhibition artists Melanie Manchot and Margareta Kern.
Special opening 8-11pm 17th June: Inselgluck/Kulturtage

The Berlin exhibition of Journeys with No Return is planned to open at Kurt-Kurt and is organized in association with the Kunstverein Tiergarten, concurrently with the 6th Berlin Biennale which opens on 10th June 2010 and the weekend of the Moabiter Kulkurtage, 17-20 June.The exhibition will feature 12 artists: KIRAN KAUR BRAR / ERGIN CAVUSOGLU / ADAM CHODZKO / JÜRGEN EISENACHER / MARGARETA KERN / MELANIE MANCHOT / OLAF NICOLAI / DENIZHAN OZER / ZINEB SEDIRA / MAYA SCHWEIZER / NASAN TUR / CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER

www.kurt-kurt.de
http://www.journeyswithnoreturn.com/content/exhibitions/berlin.html

Project update, and the talk at the Tate Britain

Preparing the talk for the 28th State symposia at the Tate Britain has been an extremely useful process, which has enabled me to focus and get to the core(s) of the project and sieve out questions which are important for me and my practice. It brought together the material from the residency in Berlin, consisting mostly of the photographs from the albums of the 'guest worker' women who arrived to West Berlin between 1968 and 1973, from Yugoslavia, and my photographs of Berlin (showing mostly memorial places, where the past and the present intersect), with my own personal documents of migration to UK - asylum application, identification card, and visas. I also included photographs from my grandparents' album, who migrated to Germany as ‘guest workers’, and whose life story has largely inspired this whole project.

Through the photographs and documents, I wanted to bring out a narrative which emerged for me having immersed myself deeply into the research and the life stories of the 'guest worker' women. I noticed a great tension in their stories, and that is a tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected (or rather ruled) by the ever-changing needs of the capitalist labour market. And that tension is still unresolved, amongst this particular generation of labour migrants, even after 40 years of living in Germany – for example most of them do not have German passport (though are allowed to stay indefinitely) and are now facing retirement and the same question which has haunted them since getting a year long visa and work permit in 1968: will they be going home? (Many have build houses 'back home', fully equiped with the best furniture, often these homes sit empty waiting for the final return...)

I am reminded here of Stuart Hall's quote: The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘When are you going back home?’ No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one way trip. There is no home to go back to. There never was. (Hall 1987:44)


I also raised questions which have become more pertinent to me as an artist, who is working more and more in ways which draw on ethnographic and anthropological methods and processes. These processes, include going into the communities of people whom I don’t know, in order to photograph or film, quite often being privy to personal information about their lives, which call for questioning the ethical dilemmas involved in this process of art-making. (For an insightful essay on the ethics of artist as ethnographer see An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer by Anthony Downey, in the recent Third Text issue 23: 5, 593 — 603).

Another question, which intrigued me and I raised at the end of the talk, is that of Saskia Sassen’s proposition of the border as a capitalist strategy. She writes in her book ‘Women, Men and the International Division of Labor’ that "the enforcement of national borders contributes to the peripheralization of a part of the world and the designation of its workers as a labor reserve. Border enforcement emerges as a mechanism facilitating the extraction of surplus value by assigning a status of formal or informal powerlessness to foreign workers generally and criminality to illegal immigrants (Petras, 1980)."
What I found interesting about this proposition (which she outlines in 1984!) is that border is a strategy, and migration is not some out of control force, as it is often portrayed in the media, but highly regulated place, servicing the needs of the market.

Finally I wanted to vocalise more, the relationship between history and storytelling [hi(story)], memory-archive-photography, and artists’ own positioning within. (yes, my talk was 20 minutes, these were questions at the end to open up the debate :) This complex and fascinating relationship, is/will be the main framework for the continuing of the Berlin strand of the 'guest worker' project. Treading gently between these two polarities of being an intruder and at the same time a recorder of (hi)stories, I aim to continue collecting photographs from the personal albums of ‘guest workers’, with the intention to build a form of an alternative archive, offering a multiple and intimate readings of history. Alongside personal family album photographs, I have begun writing short 'fictional' stories, based on the interviews with the ‘guest workers’, my grandparents, and my own memories of growing up in a ‘guest worker’ household in Yugoslavia, in the 70s and 80s. It seems to me that I am inching towards a 'book' of some sort, let's see where this will all take me, and I will bravely publish here later, an excerpt from a short 'fictional' text I wrote... I am also looking into collaborating with other writers whose interests intersect with art/photography and text...

The videos of the whole symposia will be available shortly, on http://borderlineproject.org.uk/

From March until June 2o10, I will have a chance to explore further some of the questions I raised above by being an artist-in-residence, at the University of Bath's department of Social Science and the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts. The overarching framework/theme for the residency is labour and I will be engaging with the staff and students across the University. In this process of engagement, I am very keen to open up the performative aspect of my photographic practice (which has drawn on documentary portrature) and look at the dynamics of collaboration and participation. In order to scrutinise that process, I will be looking at ways in which sociologists deal with the double-bind of research-representation. Throughout this process I will be writing a Blog, and also posting documentation/notes/images in the gallery space which will serve as a workshop-production space. To follow the GUEST residency please see a-n Blog: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/597679

Tate Britain Symposia - 28th Sate: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety

I will be taking part in the forthcoming symposium at the Tate Britain.

28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety
Tate Britain, Saturday 24 October 2009, 10.00–18.00

This symposium questions how artists and curators in Europe are currently engaging with ideas around borders, nationhood, social organisation and collaboration. What is role of art within this context, particularly in relation to the current state of European politics and increasing social unease within many rapidly changing populations? Invited international speakers include Shaheen Merali, Elvira Dyangani, and Margareta Kern.
Part of Borderline project, curated by Sonya Dyer.
Supported by Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art and Design and City Inn Westminster

image: Guestworkers at AEG Telefunken, c 1973.
From the personal album of the 'guestworker' who wished to remain anonymous, 2009

Margareta Kern: On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories)

As part of my recent art residency in Berlin, I researched an organised mass labour migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to the capitalist West Germany, which took place in the late 1960s. The labour migrants were called ‘Gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’, alluding to their temporary stay. Many of these temporary workers never returned home. Through personal interviews with those who stayed in Berlin, and research into the specific historical and political contexts of the time, a narrative began to emerge, filled with tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected by the ever-changing needs of the labour market. As well as drawing out this tension through images and narration, I also intend to explore the position of artist in re-creating and re-covering (hi)stories and memories (and in turn the relationship of those to contemporary collective historical and political narratives and myths).

Gastarbajteri nazaj doma - Migrant workers back home

The documentary film “Gastarbajteri nazaj doma” (Migrant workers back home) is a poetic portrait of three former migrant workers who left Yugoslavia in the seventies to try their luck in Germany. The economic boom of post-war Europe produced an increased demand of labour. Hence so called ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest workers), mostly from Yugoslavia and Turkey, were invited to work in the car industry and custodial services. Whereas Germany became a new home for some of them, the protagonists of the film decided to return to their home country. However, being back home they had to realise that a lot of things had changed: not only people have changed, but also the political system – a new state was born. During insightful interviews, Malika, Jože and Marija speak about their experiences of leaving their families, living in a foreign country and returning home. A film by Stefan Kreuzer, Nino Leitner and Natasa Siencnik Produced by luksuz produkcija / Krsko, Slovenia (Youth in Action Workshop 2007).
Text from the website http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2736399417624166315#

The film was made during the 10 day workshop, organised by Luksuz production,who has been working on an international youth exchange programme involving film workshops at Trška gora in the vicinity of Krško since 2002. The films created at the workshop usually deal with current social themes (youth participation, cultural diversity, European identity, etc) and are available on DVD for festival distribution and also on the Internet. Some of these films have received international awards. In 2007 a 10-day workshop hosted 40 participants working on documentary films. Researches on cultural diversity were made in various countries and presented in the form of short films. Discussions and screenings were followed by work on documentaries under the tutorship of well-known film maker Želimir Žilnik.
http://www.drustvo-dzmp.si/festival/

ZELIMIR ZILNIK himself made a very powerful short film in 1975 called “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” where using a very simple setting of a tenement – mostly foreigners – come in as though walking down an outdoor staircase and introduce themselves and their life situations to the viewers.
"With this minimal setting, Z¡ilnik strips the administrative term "inventory," taking stock or a census, of its numerical and bureaucratic meaning. Although the position of the camera is fixed, as in a police situation, and each person identifies themselves by name, it is not the number of people that counts; indeed the line of people seems to be endless. This camera situation guarantees their individuality, because each person takes stock of their own situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. They decide for themselves how long they want to speak or what they want to say in front of the camera, also exhibiting embarrassment or pleasure in posing before the camera. All of them are performers of their own role. Z¡ilnik provides them with the framework they need for it.
Zilnik shot this short film in 1975 in Munich, which is only relevant to the extent that Metzstraße is in Germany. He lived in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1973–76, worked as a director and pursued the same goal with his films here as in Yugoslavia, (which he left after being banned from working) tracking abuses and becoming actively involved in discussions as a filmmaker. One of his films was then censored in the FRG as well. “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” is a film that, together with “Unter Denkmalschutz” (1975) paradigmatically shows property speculation in many large German cities. Formerly upper middle class residential areas are systematically turned into slums by being over-populated with guest worker families that usually pay highly inflated rents. Once the objects have been run down in this way, they can be sold – once the tenants have been given notice – as profitable office and condominium palaces."
Text from the website of a very interesting project PROJEKT MIGRATION

A seventh woman?

Back to wonderful John Berger’s book ‘A seventh man’, its title stemming from a data that in 1973, in Germany and Britain every seventh manual worker was an immigrant. If any of you reading this can work out contemporary equivalent of women or men worker I’d be very grateful. I’ll try and gather the data too.

I've found this bit from Berger’s text inspiring:

“A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ’Did you come by photograph or train’. All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence.”



With his words in mind I am looking at a photograph of one of the 'guest worker' women I interviewed and her friend, taken outside the dorm in Potsdamer Strasse, where they lived in the early 70’s (image above). Dorms were provided by their employers, a modest accommodation they shared with other women, sometimes up to seven women to a room (number seven again). They are leaning on the car, a beautiful Volkswagen Beatle, and I am trying to add colour in my mind to the black and white photograph. The Beatle looks white (or could it be yellow?) and new and shiny. Their dress could be green/blue/orange combination (on the left) and yellow (or white?) and dark blue on the right; the material was probably polyester or acrylic. I can imagine it making static electricity with each movement, so when they touched the car they got a small snap, a tiny bite to the top of their fingertips. I hear them laughing and then leaning on the car, hoping the owner won’t come too soon. I don’t imagine it to be their car. They would have arrived recently to West Berlin, and were saving all their money to send home. They probably felt a tinge of guilt for buying the beautiful dresses, maybe spending their second salary on it. The first one was sent home, with a message that they are fine, treated well, and that they are earning German marks now, their journey and separation from home justified.

Metaphorically, they arrived in this Beatle. Stories of wealth and new opportunities have certainly influenced and still have an impact on decisions to pack ones bag and set on a journey. They traveled in the back of the car, dreaming of a moment when they will be behind the steering wheel. And they arrived not only in 1970 but again in 2009, they came in the timeless Beatle into my own life, and into my own story of migration and travel. And now I see them looking at me, and images which are neither theirs nor mine are showing themselves to me. In this translation between their wor(l)ds and mine, a (hi)story is emerging and their absence from all these years is demanding presence. They are here, they have arrived.

A seventh man

A good friend of mine Aidan Jolly (check out his work at Virtual Migrants) told me recently about a book by John Berger called ‘A Seventh Man’ - a book of images and text about the experience of Migrant workers in Europe. It’s a great book, combining photographs with words, text being a combination of factual data, Berger’s Marxist take on it, and his poetic descriptions of the migrant worker coming from Turkey, Portugal, Yugoslavia... to the cities of Western Europe . I’m not finished with reading it, but am finding that it is opening me up in thinking of ways to talk/represent the complexity of the issue such as the ‘guest workers’ or to use a more contemporary label ‘labour migrants’. Berger says in his introduction that this book is limited to the experience of male migrant worker, and to write of the female migrant workers' experience would require a whole book in itself. In 1975 he hoped it will be done.



In 2000 in the world there were 175 million migrants, out of whom 85.1 million are women. In 2002 the overall number of women migrants in Europe was 51% , so a significant number of women are migrating, and participating in the labour market of the receiving countries (data based on selected United Nations data, statistics of the outflow and inflow states and EU statistics, from Slany, Kristina. 2008. ‘Female migration from Central-Eastern Europe: demographic and sociological aspects’ In: Migration and mobility in an enlarged Europe: a gender perspective). ‘In the migration literature, migrant women and their experiences often remain invisible and get subsumed under those of men’, write Erdem and Mattes (Erdem, Esra and Mattes, Monika. 2003. ‘Gendered Policies – Gendered Patterns: Female Labour Migration from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s’. In: European Encounters: Migrants, migration and European societies since 1945) and this is echoed by Morokvašić who says that ‘mobility and migration have a specific significance for women due to being historically associated with immobility and passivity, regarded as dependents rather than migrants in their own right, their migration often tied to migration of men’ (Morokvašić, Mirjana. 2007. ‘Migration, Gender, Empowerment’. In: Gender Orders Unbound. Globalisation, Restructuring and Reciprocity. Also see Morokvasic: 'Settled in mobility': engendering post-wall migration in Europe').

In 1973 in West Germany women made up 31.9 percent of the entire guest worker population with the Yugoslav women as the largest group amongst the female guest workers (Erdem and Mattes 2003; Dobrivojević, Ivana. 2007. ‘In Quest for Welfare: The Labour Migration of Yugoslav Citizens).

I will continue to expand on the relationship of gender to migration, as I am curious to unfold its complexity and to see what it means for the migrant women and men today. Even though my focus is on the migrant women, I am looking at gendered conceptions of both women and men, and also gendered policies of the receiving countries and their home countries, which often shape and affect their migrations and positions within societal and family structures. And even though I am researching the period of the late 60’s, its echoes are still present today and these echoes are growing louder with each headline speaking about the effects of globalised recession (it seems that finally word globalisation is loosing its aura of positivity) and the ‘collapse’ of capitalism.

zagreb - berlin 1968 / berlin - london 2009

My time as a guest artist and (in a way) a guest worker in Berlin drew close too quickly. As it is often the case, things start unraveling as the time is getting tighter, perhaps this happens because of the knowledge that time is running out. And so it was that my last week of residency was filled with many meetings and interviews, which I have only now begun to process. As I listen over the recordings of interviews in my studio in London, I feel a great urge to turn these personal stories into histories and histories into stories…

I met Ana just a few days before my impending trip back to London, and she showed me a note she kept all these years: it was from the bureau of employment letting her know that she will travel (to Berlin) on the 12th July 1968, and to be in front of JAT’s building in Zagreb (Yugoslav Airline Company/Jugoslavenski Avio Transport) at 3pm.




As I process the material gathered in Berlin and further work on the project I will continue writing and posting in this transitional blogospheric space where thoughts move from the personal to the public. In this space, I hope to develop the blog as a resource, a reflection space and a form of an archive. And in the process of piecing the personal stories with the historical, political and social narratives of the time, I hope in some way to capture the place and the time, so that it can tell its stories...